1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for managing the operating status of a device connected to a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are systems that manage the operating status of a network device, such as an image forming apparatus equipped with a communication control apparatus, from a remote place. In such systems, a plurality of network devices and a management apparatus for managing network devices are connected to each other via a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN) or the Internet. Each network device transmits its trouble information and operating information such as function usage frequency (counter information indicating the number of uses of a functionality) to the management apparatus. For example, the function usage frequency or the like is transmitted at regular intervals. The management apparatus is configured to accumulate the received operating information and manage the information as a history so that the network device operating information accumulated for a given period of time spanning from the past to the present can be referenced and analyzed.
There are cases where a single network device is shared by a plurality of departments (users or user groups). In order to manage the status of use for each department, a network device has been proposed in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-209424, in which department information is set in the network device, and the function usage frequency is recorded for each department. Furthermore, the network device is configured to be capable of transmitting function usage frequency per department to the management apparatus at a regular interval.
Furthermore, in the case where a plurality of network devices are used in the same environment and are shared by a plurality of departments, due to setting efficiency considerations, department settings are often commonly set in the network devices. It is often the case that each department usually uses only a few of the network devices, and thus a situation in which the individual network devices include infrequently used department information can arise. In this case, in some of the network devices, the function usage frequency information per department remains almost the same over several months. That is, the management apparatus receives such function usage frequency information per department that remains almost the same as well as from each network device at a regular interval and manages the information as a history.
Department information set in each network device is not fixed in the network device, and the administrator of the network device can perform addition and deletion at a later time. Accordingly, if the management apparatus simply discards the department information whose function usage frequency remains the same in order to efficiently accumulate a large amount of information, the following problems can occur.
For example, when tallying up the usage frequency information for a certain period of time, it is not possible to make a distinction, from the tally results, between “department that does not exist in the network device (that is to be added or has been deleted)” and “department that exists in the network device but was not accumulated in the storage area because the information remains the same”. Accordingly, tally results that correctly reflect the department information set in the network device cannot be output, and as a result, the administrator or the like of the network device cannot obtain the correct status.
The present invention provides a technique for efficiently managing the operating status per department of a network device while maintaining the accuracy.